May 2008

It’s Like Reality, Without the Screaming

Last week I appeared “live” in the virtual world of Second Life to promote my new book. (Have I mentioned it?) My avatar (a character that looks like me) answered questions in a theater packed with other avatars. Then I let them come on stage and kick my in the ‘nads.

The scene was captured by a viewer and posted on youtube. Now you too can enjoy watching me get pummeled.

About 60% into the video, an avatar that looks like Dilbert appears and attacks me. It was art imitating life, imitating art beating the crap out of something imitating me. Truly weird. If you know any Dilbert readers, they might enjoy this link:

There is also a Dogbert in the video, but when he is in kicking mode, he grows giant frog legs so it’s not so obvious it’s him in this particular clip. And there is a chat going on that you can't see, so it's quite a party on stage. In the end, I dance with Dilbert.

Second Life is already nerdily delicious, but as computing power increases, and the images become increasingly photorealistic, it’s hard to imagine wanting to travel in real life to have a meeting. You might want to meet people once just to be sure they exist. But after that, the avatar would do.

And with a bit more programming, those avatars can have the illusion of being sentient. They could interact online without your guidance and learn things and make friends. They might even be programmed to believe they have free will. I give it ten years.

In Second Life, they have a currency called Linden dollars. You can earn them and trade them for real money. In theory, someday you could program a little Donald Trump avatar and have him go earn money for you in the virtual world and wire it to you in the real world.

My theory, as regular readers know, is that you and I are already avatars in someone else’s virtual world. Whenever we think we are losing money, say by gambling or investing or paying taxes, we are really just wiring money to our overlords.

Special thanks to Aimee Weber for creating my avatar and managing the Second Life event. Her whole team was great.

Did you see this: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202803015&cid=nl_IWK_daily Gamers (via gaming consoles) are donating CPU power to cancer research. 670,000 Playstation 3's have contributed to the world's most powerful distributed computing network (per Guiness World Records), which is used to simulate proteins folding. I've donated a lot of CPU time to this project, but I don't keep my PS3 on all the time, because it's noisy and I'm afraid that it'll overheat.

Scott,
Looks like your shameless and blatant self promotion has finally paid off ;)
Everyone in my office is talking about the "revenge-of-the- character-thingy" .
Well I think we need a new word for this kind of marketing added in our lexicons.
(Forgot to add ... Everyone is waiting for the first print of the pirated-scanned-online-version )
*grins the evil-grin*

I am currently reading a book called 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson and it is very much like what you were talking about - the whole.. using avatars to do real life things...
I haven't finished it yet, so I can't tell you much more, but so far it's very interesting... Plus, it was written in 1992 and it's pretty cool that he was writing about this so long ago, when avatars were not popular or really considered much.

Wow. That was like -- really, really pointless. I just can't get over how pointless that was. I mean, a George Bush speech defending how water-boarding may (or may not be) torture is also pointless, but that's just peanuts to how pointless that Second Life 'event' was.

Thanks for posting it to YouTube, by the way, otherwise I might have had some lingering feeling that I missed something. Instead I can heave this huge sigh of relief.

I just wanted to say thanks for doing the event, Scott, and thanks for pointing to the video. I greatly enjoyed the Q&A portion, but the server was so overloaded I couldn't get close enough to the stage to even see what was going on afterwards.

I read your feed from LJ, so I don't usually come here to see the comments on your blog. But now it makes so much more sense the way you say some of the stuff you do... you have a whole bunch of trolls in your comments, who, by the sounds of things, post attacks all the time.

I didn't think much of this particular video either, but really. Smack 'em down.

Imagine when there are avatar with free will. Your avatar goes to a meeting with the publisher and make unrealistic commitments about timeline and the fee for it. They you would be slaving hard to meet the timeline commited by someone who is not even real.

I also watched a couple of the others that came up afterwards of you speaking to a group. Strange, I hadn't realized until now that I'd given you a way of talking in my head, which, just like imagining how someone looks before you've seen them, was completely wrong. No worries; you're real voice is even better than the one I'd invented for you.

There was an article about "your" idea I read a couple weeks ago (linked from Gmail). I will try to find it for you. The guy that thought it up said he thought there was about a 1 in 5 chance it was true (and admitted he only gave that low an estimate because he was optimistic).

hm, there is no me
i remember clearly that Dilbert was kicking you, but that Dilbert was like taller and bigger than this one
i am not sure about my perceptions now
but may be this all was before me entering the stage
soooo, you did not notice me, story of my life :(
next time, if there will be the next time, would you look for the green haired mute femidas prone to crashing into the basement, please
though i don't know for what, just smile may be
those females kicking you without context were disgusting
i would so slap them back

speaking of cats in the shower, i recalled another old joke
a woman complains to her neighbour:
- your cat is so loud, what do you do to her
- i wash it everyday
- i bathe my cat everyday too, but my cat is not crying as loud as yours
- do you squeeze water out of it?
- out of what, who - the cat?
- sure, what do you wash in the first place, hellooo?